Dragonvale Tips and Tricks

Recently, I’ve been playing Dragonvale, a dragon-farming game from Backflip Studios. While it’s far from perfect, I’ve found it to be a lot of fun, and I’ve had some decent success with it. So…I thought I’d share some tips and tricks.

Get Some Friends!

I’m putting this one first, simply because it’s critical to so many of the other suggestions I’ll make :). Having friends in Dragonvale is the key to two really important things: getting gems, and getting money.

You can, of course, pay *real* cash to get gems and money, but that’s stoopid. It’s better to make friends in Dragonvale, and help each other out.

So for example, you are able to visit your friend’s islands whenever you want. Once a day, you’ll receive 3 free bonuses of money from each friend, and the amount you receive increases as you level up. For example, at level 15, I’m currently pulling in about $7,500 per day, per friend.

Unfortunately, Dragonvale’s current friend management is AWFUL, so I don’t visit each friend every day. However, when you need some cash, it’s an easy way to score some pretty signifiant dough–if you’re willing to invest the time.

So…how do you get friends? Well, you can do it the hard way and browse through the Facebook Dragonvale fan pages, and add people requesting Game Center friends. Or, with the new Game Center in iOS 5, you can actually pretty easily request friends based on GC’s “recommendations”. Using this, I was able to add over 300 friends in less than 2 days…which inevitably means a nice pile of gems!

Clear Your Islands

You’ll notice pretty quickly that each of your islands starts off as a pretty unkempt, overgrown forest filled with trees, rocks, more trees, and more rocks :). Now I know that it’s tempting to funnel all of your money toward leveling dragons and breeding new ones…however, I’m a big advocate of clearing your islands of trees and rocks pretty early on. The biggest reason? Experience points. If you systematically clear your islands, you’ll notice that you rack up some mega experience points. And the best part is that it only costs you money…no gems required. So go ahead, get the wheels moving on clearing your islands; you can breed dragons while you wait.

Smart Leveling

When leveling up your dragons, be smart. There are a few things to think about here.

The amount of money any particular habitat can generate at any one time is limited. For example, the Plant habitat has an upper-bound of $500. So, having 4 level 10 dragons in one Plant habitat is not going to do you a lot of good.

Related to #1, if you have habitats that have a higher economic upper-bound, it will behoove you to have some moderately-leveled dragons abiding there, so you can maximize the cash you’re bringing in per-habitat, per collection. Just as 4 level 10 dragons in a Plant habitat is a waste, 2 level 1 dragons in an Air habitat are also a bad strategy.

Finally, leveling up your dragons obviously comes by purchasing treats for them. So carefully weigh the cost of treats against the benefit which your dragons’ levels will bring, given the current rank– you are at.

Trick or Treat?

Speaking of treats, be careful about how you go about procuring treats for your dragons. If you look closely at the breakdown for each tier of treat production, you might notice that it’s a degrading scale as the prices become more expensive. Here’s a breakdown:

Treat

Amount

Cost

Time

Total Food / Cost Per Hour

Dragon Snaps

5

50

00:00:00:30

600 / $6000

Dragon Root

20

250

00:00:05:00

240 / $3000

Zazzberries

75

1000

00:00:30:00

150 / $2000

Blushrooms

300

5000

00:02:00:00

150 / $2500

Pumpermelons

800

15000

00:06:00:00

133 / $2500

Dragon Fruit

3000

75000

01:00:00:00

125 / $3125

As you can see, you get a lot less bang for your buck as you go after larger quantities. Personally, unless you are planning on not looking at Dragonvale for a day or two, buying Dragon Fruit is ridiculous. On the other hand, sticking exclusively to Dragon Snaps will give you the best deal…assuming you are committed to harvesting and re-ordering food every 30 seconds

Personally, I tend to go with either Zazzberries, or Blushrooms, depending on how much I plan on playing Dragonvale during the day.

Intelligent Breeding

There are a million breeding guides available, so I’ll stay away from that subject. However, my general advice is to be smart about breeding. What I mean by this is:

Pay attention to how long your potential egg will take to be fertilized, and then to hatch. Nothing worse than setting some dragon-lovin’ in progress, and then realizing that it will be 12+ hours until the “magic happens”…and then an extra 12 hours to hatch.

Pay attention to your available habitats. Unless you’ve upgraded your nursery ridiculously, you have limited space for “staging” eggs. If you don’t have habitats built, or don’t have room in existing habitats, your egg will have to sit until you make room. While this doesn’t hurt anything, it may prevent you from moving forward with other eggs…and since Dragonvale is a waiting game anyway, this will just create more frustration.

Unless you are ready to breed hybrids, be sure that the dragons you’re breeding are actually the “base type” dragons that will create the proper match for the hybrid you want to create. In other words, just because a dragon is “red” does not mean that it fulfills the “fire dragon” requirement of a particular match. And just because a dragon happens to live in an Earth habitat, does not mean it will create a mud dragon. In general, since you have to wait so long for eggs to be fertilized and hatched, be paranoid about breeding.

Take a look at the “Goals” for your particular level. Some hybrids will score you bigger experience/cash rewards than others. Go after these first, Yes, you’ll eventually need to get them all in order to fulfill the achievement. But you have plenty of time for that, so grab the experience and cash as early as possible.

Maggie, you just play and gain exp until you reach lv20. Btw I’m trying to give my friend some stuff (more than 1 gem a day). So I was wondering if anyone knows how to do this. If you tell me I’ll give you something in return (like 500 gems). I promise. Please help me.

Me, while the only gifts you can give are 1 gem to a person per day, there is an unproven glitch where you go to someone else’s island and gift your friend something then go to another island and repeat. Goodluck and, yes, I do like gems.

Me, there is an unproven glitch where you gift your friend a gem, go to a friends island, and gift it to them again (Only works if the person whose island you go to has not used his gifts yet), the move to another island and repeat the gifting process for unlimited gifts. It’s said to not use the other people’s gift. Goodluck and my GC ID is Hazanchuk

I have an issue I can’t find an answer to. When I try to buy an egg even if I go through th hatchery it try’s to set a dragon right onto the habitat. I don’t want this cuz I want to do my goals but it won’t give me the option to get an egg anymore. Can anyone help?

hey guy that is at level 13 or any other level you get experience when a egg is done hatching or breeding when a building is done when you place a decoration when a island is done building or when treats are done growing.

Hey I was just looking through and could not help but post this. If u guys are hurting on cash and xp theres one quick way to get it, breeding. I personally breed a bronze dragon for 1.5 ml coins and 2 mil xp good look:)

Hi, i’m already at lvl 29, please add me , in gamecenter. I’m stuck at having gems… please help meeee. My id is Fiscess, and I will make drgaonsai tree in my farm. Then i could give more gems to all of you

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With the recent updates to DragonVale v1.8, the app has seen some impressive evolution since its inception. The app now has a thriving community, and despite its ridiculous freemium business model, the updates keep coming…so money is being made off of it. As we get closer to the 2.0 release (not suggesting it’s imminent), I…